Healing Hands

This week is National Nurses Week, a time when we take the opportunity to honor and express our gratitude for those in this noble profession. It takes a special kind of person to be a nurse. My mom is a nurse, and she retired last year after working more than 50 years in a nursing home. What an amazing life she has had.

During a part of my childhood, I dreamed of becoming a nurse or a vet. I wanted to care for and heal living beings. I quickly realized, however, that my inability to overcome the sight of blood might be a stumbling block to success in these fields. As for my mom, she never hesitated with childhood injuries. Others had the option of family physicians or ER visits. We had my mom, the nurse. If you need a few stitches, a butterfly bandage will do. Mom can fix it. If you're not feeling quite right, there were multiple medications and vitamins to make you well. If you happen to accidentally slam a pickup truck door on your finger and it is hanging by a sliver of skin...Well, Mom can fix it. She knows what to do. If the cat gets his tail caught in the car motor, the nurse will arrive to find him, clean him up, and help him to heal. Healing hands are not just reserved for people, you know. Any wounded creature could find healing in the hands of the nurse.

Nurses may be the most needed yet most underrated service person around, with teachers coming in a close second. If you ever hear a bad nurse story, you can rest assured there was a valid reason behind it. You know the one -- way too busy to care, coming only after 5 beeps of the "need help" button. Many times the reason behind those stories is that the nurse was given twice as many patients as she could reasonably handle, and skipped her lunch to catch up on the paperwork required after giving her patients their necessary care. Perhaps the nurse who is slow to attend to a needy patient just had to process an emergency for another. The daily experiences of a nurse are never identical and never ordinary.

Being a nurse means means service and sacrifice -- other people always come first. In our home, it meant that we would have to share my mom on Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. There was never a year when she was with her family for every holiday. Her patients needed her, and she was there to answer the call.

Nurses can adapt to working at any hour of the day or night. They have to be flexible. If they aren't in first shift meetings at 6:45 am, you will find them walking the hallways on the third shift at 2 am or working a double 12-hour shift. When we rubbed the sleep out of our eyes as children and trudged to the kitchen on school days, we could smell breakfast, kept warm in the retro green bottom oven. Mom had risen at 5:30 am to get ready for her day and to provide us with a hot cooked breakfast.

My mom's days of nursing required special attire. I can remember the white dress uniform (starched, pressed, and hanging in the closet), special white nursing panty hose (carefully hand washed and hanging over the shower curtain rod), and the white Ball-Band leather nursing shoes. Lastly and most memorably, there was the nurse's cap. The nurse's hat required a special process to get it just right. My mom's method was to drench it in starch and carefully press it onto the bathroom mirror to dry. Once dry, the stiff white material could be peeled off and folded into the final form, ready to be bobby pinned into place. 

The nurse's implements were no less memorable. A white nursing version of a pocket protector held the special scissors that we kids were not allowed to use. Bandage scissors were bent at a 45° angle a few inches from the end, with a protective "foot" to allow them to slide under and enable safe removal of bandages. As kids, we thought they were just plain cool. Also included in that pocket pouch were my mom's ink pens, nail clippers, and the blue name tag bearing her name, Mrs. C. Raynor, R.N., Head Nurse. Her stethoscope and blood pressure cuff completed the outfit.

There were a few rare occasions when we got to visit mom at work. Except for an injury that required her attention, we didn't go very often. When we did visit, my favorite memory of Wesley Nursing Home was the ice machine. It was full of the really good kind of ice, the small round crunchy balls that make even a drink of water so much more special. 

Wesley was not like a hospital or a physician's office. None of these patients would ever leave, except on that final trip when they had breathed their last breath. Of all the things my mom had to face in her nursing job, death seemed to be the most difficult to my young mind. As the years passed, she began to care for patients whose years were less than her own, and whose longevity was a fraction of her increasing age. Age advancement and the sometimes unfortunate grip of degenerative brain functions knew no boundaries. Throughout her years as a nurse, my mom cared for dignitaries, writers, teachers, professionals, and blue collar workers. She cared for those of every race and ethnicity. At this final stage in their lives, neither money nor social class afforded any luxury or any distinction. Yet, the nurses who attended these people cared for them with dignity, respect, and with healing hands.

My young senses were assaulted as I entered the rectangular, nondescript building. Wesley was a private advanced years nursing facility operated by the Methodist Church. The bright florescent lighting reflected off the white ceiling, giant white speckled linoleum floor tiles, and whitewashed walls at Wesley. There was an aroma of cleansers and old age. The rickety steel doors of the elevator slowly opened to expose a small paneled, boxlike structure that slowly carried us up to the 2nd floor. The scurrying white-uniformed bodies of nursing employees darted in and out of open patient room doors. Semi-mobile elderly men shuffled along the hallways in their wheelchairs by using their one good foot to propel them slowly along. Elderly women doddered along, mumbling quietly to themselves.

Times changed as they always do and so did my mom's nursing persona. The starched hat was the first thing to go. The white dress and white panty hose also gave way to colored printed uniform tops, pants, and sneakers to accommodate the constant hours of walking and standing. The job remained mostly the same, and the hours took their weekly toll. Though she was sometimes drained and weary from long hours of care giving, there were many times when my mom was quick to say, "I love my work." She truly did.

I've met many other nurses during the course of my life, and they all have the same innate skill to care. To really care. Brenda has a kind and compassionate heart, one ready to fix anything whether it be in the ER or on a mission trip. Janet is a cardiac nurse: focused, careful, and calm, even in the midst of a crisis. Elizabeth & Debbie earned their nursing degrees later in life, juggling the challenges of marriage and children to answer the call to heal. Stacia & Laura have served in the children's hospital, perhaps one of the most challenging places to commit one's healing hands. Jordan & Naomi deliver babies, and have celebrated new life in their hands on a regular basis. I have other nurse friends in various specialties, but they all have the same heart and the same hands -- expressive, caring, serving. Everyone should have at least one nurse in their life. They truly are special people.

Last year, at age 78, my mom entered her final retirement from nursing, but her nursing legacy will live on. Through her expression of love, inspiration, and example, her first granddaughter recently graduated with a nursing degree. There won't be any white starched hats or clean, pressed dresses, but there will be a servant's heart and healing hands embodied in my niece, Brandi, as these timeless nursing qualities pass from one generation to another. Thank you to my mom, and to all the nurses who use their hands to care and to heal.

Your Report Card: "C+" ???

Do you ever feel like you can do better? Do you ever feel like you can be a little more faithful with your goals, do a little better with your job, exercise a little more, eat a little better, make a little more money, be more kind? In other words, do you ever feel like your 'good effort' always seems to fall short?

I have often considered myself a proponent of being excellent in everything. I’ve encouraged so many to do the same, and to maximize the gift that God put inside of them. If He is a creator, a perfect creator, and we are made in his image, then we should also create (perhaps not perfectly, but at least on a pretty high level). Unfortunately, my judgment of where that level of excellence is and whether or not I've reached it seems to constantly change like a bouncing buoy on the stormy waves of the ocean.

My desire to achieve "better" and "best" started in grade school and continued into every other area of my life. Though the results of my hard work were sometimes noteworthy, many times my life lacked rest and peace, and the satisfaction of a job 'well done.' Many times I saw my fruit as only "good." Average. Satisfactory. In other words, my life grade was a "C+". Unlike Ralphie in A Christmas Story who believed his Christmas essay deserved an A++++, I knew my self-imposed grade was about what I deserved. That being said, I was still deflated with my C+. I wanted an A.

Societal influences do not help this internal conflict. There is always a pressure (sometimes subtle, sometimes overt) to be more, to do more, to earn more, to have more… to always succeed higher. We often compare ourselves, our children, our job, our home, our accomplishments to those around us.

Now don’t get me wrong here. I do believe that we should aim high. Dreams are meant to propel us into places we never thought we could achieve. Influence in society as successful people requires a relevance and an adeptness at a talent or gift. As Christians, we are called to be salt. Salt changes its environment, and its absence is noticed.

It's not the goals that I'm speaking of. It's the result. It's the grade. Where did I land? In my mind, it was always short of my goal.

As I was contemplating all of this, I remembered a passage of scripture that I had read hundreds of times. No doubt you may have read it many times before. Even those who don’t profess faith are familiar with it. But sometimes a familiar passage can take on a new meaning. This was one of those times.

In the story of creation in the Bible, there is a phrase that repeats over and over throughout Genesis 1. It reads exactly the same in different translations. This phrase occurs after the conclusion of each element of creation.

“God saw that it was good.”

Good.

Not perfect.

Not even very good.

Just good.

What does good mean? I started to think of current educational standards, i.e. grades, as a way to evaluate our work. Even to adults, grades or performance reviews are an indication of how we are doing. If God were creating the world today and he was giving a grade to his creation by his view that it was good, what would the grade for “Good” be?

After reading multiple sites about what grades really mean and what I knew to be true, I determined that God was giving his work, his amazing creative work, somewhere between a “B” and a “C.” In other words, "C+".

Ok, now before you declare me a heretic and ignore the rest of what I have to say, let me finish. Hear me out until the end.

At the very end of creation culminating in man’s formation, when God surveyed everything, all of it, the sum total of all the “good,” the end result was ... “VERY GOOD.”

At no individual point along the way was anything considered “very good.” It wasn’t until all the work, all the results were put together, viewed not as separate events but as a string pieced together into a whole, that this designation was applied.

Immediately after this ultimate evaluation occurred and everything was finished, it allowed a very important and deliberate act to happen. “He rested.”

As I applied this to my own life, I realized that my ability to rest and to be satisfied is directly proportional to how I feel I am doing. Have I achieved excellent, very good, good, or have I failed?

When we have a connection with God that allows us to work at individual items in our lives to the point of them being “good” and when we are ok with “good” being enough, the overall perspective of all these “good” things put together will synthesize into something that is “very good.” In other words, we don’t have to strive to be excellent at every single thing we do. If we are hoping to achieve that, we find ourselves weary, unrested, and in some cases exhausted.

I believe if our perspective is to look at all the good, we can then string it together and view it as something very, very good. Not only that, we can truly rest. We can know that we are doing what we were created to do and doing it well.

Now for the verse that I alluded to above -- the "well done, my good and faithful servant" verse that many of us might have no doubt quoted. When Jesus told the parable of the talents, He uses the phrase, "Well done". Of course that's what we all want to hear, and at first glance, it seems to be contradictory to the verses in Genesis. When we put the verse in perspective, however, this affirmation is said only after the master returned from being gone for a LONG TIME. Once again, the 'well done' or 'very good' designation comes at the end of a progressive string of 'good' decisions and actions. Who knows how long the master was gone. A week, a month, a year, 10 years? The point is, it was a long time. We have to look at our life as a long journey that we are somewhere in the middle of.

The problem still remains... what is good?

Eating from the one tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, led to the fall of man, the entrance of sin, and a host of other things, including a perpetual need to work and a difficulty in finding rest. Why? Because we now have to figure out what is good. And for someone like me, good is never good enough. This constant pursuit leads to more work and more striving. Knowing how to define good was the temptation then and it is our temptation now.

As you examine the different elements of your life, I suggest you look at them through God's lens. Are you making a "C+"? Then it is good. If you feel like a failure, remember that no final grade is ever based on any one thing, and your semester isn't over yet. Sometimes you'll feel excellent and sometimes just good and sometimes like a failure. It's all ok. The purpose of not eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is that Adam and Eve didn't have to figure it out. They could rest in relationship with and trusting of God that they would not be judged on every single success or failure.

I'm still a proponent of excellence. But I'm also a proponent of relationship with God. I have learned not to exhaust myself doing more, achieving more, trying to keep up with those around me or with my own view of excellence. Instead I have kept the connection that allows me to see my life and work as good.

Find out from God what GOOD really means for you. Knowing that all of our good, in connection with a perfect creator, will ultimately be pieced together into something beautiful and very, very good. When you realize that, your "C+" is good enough.

Subsequently, you will be able to rest, consistently, knowing that you don’t have to figure it all out. One step at a time, one task at a time. It is good.


Related blog post:  Framing the Pages of Your Life